camera, her arms out as she showed off her new jacket while walking along a mud track with a group of older women. Everything else was grey – the sky, the buildings behind her, even the old women and their clothes. But not her: she was a splash of colour and her eyes were bright as they looked into the lens, perhaps smiling at her own reflection.
The caption simply said: ‘The Poppy’. The photographer was Finnish.
Her full name was Zina Osmanovich, and the picture had been taken on her fifteenth birthday. Two days later she was grabbed by Serbs, it said, along with the rest of her village, and killed while trying to escape.
Fifteen. I glanced down at Baby-G.
I tried not to, but couldn’t stop myself looking back and staring into her eyes. The last time I’d seen them they were dull and glazed like those of a dead fish, her mutilated body covered in mud. Tears started to well.
It had been nine years. What the fuck was wrong with me? I wanted to move, and yet I didn’t. In the end I just stood and gazed at her. I thought about her life and Kelly’s. How would things have turned out for them both? Would they have got married? Had kids of their own?
What? What could I have done?
I felt a hand on my arm.
‘I’m not surprised you can’t tear yourself away from it,’ a voice behind me said. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ There was a sigh. ‘What I’d give to have taken a shot like that . . . Wouldn’t you, Nick Collins?’
15
I spun round to find myself face to face with a grinning, clean-shaven Arab, who had the whitest teeth this side of the Oscar ceremony.
‘Jeral!’ I shook my head with surprise and what I hoped looked like delight. Pointless pretending I wasn’t who he thought I was: we’d spent too long together in Bosnia.
We shook hands. His face was still creased in a huge smile. ‘It’s been a few years, hasn’t it?’
Jerry still had a touch of Omar Sharif about him, even though he’d put on a few pounds. There were specks of paint in his hair and over his watch, as if he’d been having an argument with a roller. ‘You haven’t changed a bit, mate.’ I glanced at the holes in his faded black jeans, and the black shirt that had obviously been ironed with a cold mess-tin. ‘And neither has your kit . . .’
He rubbed the thinning patch on his head ruefully before giving me the once-over. He looked as if he wanted to say I hadn’t changed either, but couldn’t quite bring himself to tell that big a lie. In the end he just rubbed his head again and his expression became more serious. ‘By the way, I’m Jerry now. Arabic names haven’t gone down too well around here since 9/11. And things in Lackawanna don’t help . . .’
He came from a steel town in upstate New York that had become part of the rust belt. His parents had been among the hundreds who’d emigrated from the Yemen to work in the factories, but were probably now existing on welfare. Lackawanna had been in the news quite a lot in recent weeks. Six Yemeni-Americans who’d been arrested for attending an al-Qaeda training camp in 2001 came from there – the first Made-in-the-USA Islamic extremists. If I had, I’d have changed my name too.
I’d liked Jerry immediately. There was something that set him apart from the two distinct camps of journalists I’d come across in Sarajevo – the manic, gung-ho kids who’d turned up from all over the world in the hope of making their name, and the establishment figures who rarely risked leaving the basement of the hotel.
The night I met him in Sarajevo, I was having a quiet beer at the bar of the Holiday Inn while waiting for another job. It was the only hotel still operating during the siege. I stayed there because it was where the media hung out, and I wanted to keep up my cover story.
Jerry was arguing with a group of newsmen. He’d just made it back from Serb-occupied territory while some of the people around him hadn’t made it further than the front door. They just went down into the basement each morning, climbed into a UN APC, and hitched a ride to HQ. There they’d pick up a press release, take it back to the hotel, pad it out with a few quotes – usually from other journalists – and file it as from the front line. Jerry was one of the few guys I’d seen who chased the real stories.
He’d broken away from the argument and come and sat next to me at the bar.
‘They got their heads up their asses, man.’ He took another swig of cat’s piss lager. ‘This isn’t one war – it’s hundreds.’
I looked shocked. ‘You mean there’s more to this than Serbs versus Muslims?’
For an American, he was quick on the uptake. His face lit up. ‘Just a little bit. I’ve heard there’s a Muslim- Croat thing going on, and Croat versus Serb. And as for Mostar . . .’ He let it hang. He was testing me.
It was my turn to smile. ‘Versus the rest of the south. Tuzla?’
‘Versus the rest of the north, man. Like I said, hundreds.’ He extended his hand. ‘Hi, I’m Jeral. You with the networks?’
We shook. ‘Nick Collins. Anyone with a chequebook.’
Over the next couple of bad beers I’d discovered that, although he looked like Omar Sharif’s kid brother, he was born and bred in the States and couldn’t have been more apple pie if he’d tried. And he was the only fluent Arab speaker I’d ever come across who’d never been anywhere near the Middle East. Come to that, he’d not even been out of New York state until he was nineteen. He spoke Arabic at home with his Yemeni parents and some Saturday classes at the mosque, but English at school and in the real world.
Art Works was like a library. Jerry leaned closer to keep the noise down. ‘Why you here? What’s your story?’
‘I was just passing and I saw the sign . . .’
There was a pause. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. It had been nine years; as far as he knew I’d just been in Bosnia to take pictures, and that was how I wanted to keep it.
I was keen to get away from here and hoped he felt the same, but he just stood there, smiling at me. ‘What are you doing nowadays? Still clicking away?’
I shook my head. ‘That’s all changed, mate. I’ve been doing some advertising stuff until recently. Boring, but it paid the bills. Now I’m just taking a break. What about you? Any of these yours?’
‘Actually, they’re good, but not that good, apart from that one.’ He pointed over my shoulder at Zina. ‘And one other.’
Two of the Donna Karan gang stood behind us, wanting us to move on so they could tick Zina off in their catalogue. They looked us up and down, and one of them sniffed rather pointedly into her handkerchief.
Jerry had more contempt for them than he could hide. ‘Nick, come and have a look.’
‘I’ve got to go, mate, stuff to do.’
I needed to get away from him. He belonged to Nick Collins, not Nick Stone. But he wasn’t taking no for an answer. ‘Come on, two seconds. This is the other one I wish was mine. It’s going to be really famous one day.’
We walked back to ‘Chetnik Mama’. He scanned the image, his face alive with admiration.
A woman wandered past, fanning her face with her catalogue.
‘It’s one hell of a photograph. But that’s not what’s going to make this famous. It’s him.’ He tapped on the perspex where the man was helping the women in the background. ‘You know who this is? Go on, have a closer look.’
I moved in. It was Beardilocks, I was sure of it. Leaning forward, I studied his face, my eyes just inches from his. His pale skin was smooth, stretched over high cheekbones below deepset eyes. He needed to put on a bit of weight to fill out that shirt collar. What struck me most was that, even in the midst of all the death and destruction, his nails were perfectly manicured and his long dark beard neatly clipped.
‘No.’ I pulled back from the frame. ‘Not a clue.’
‘Exactly. But one day you will. His face will be on as many T-shirts as Che Guevara’s. They wanted some of
